Enigma

hit a shaky D. They started to sing. From somewhere near the back she could hear Weitzman's rather beautiful tenor. It was only as they reached the fifth verse ('So be it, Lord; thy throne shall never, Like earth's proud empires, pass away') that Hester heard the door scrape open behind them. She turned, and so did half the others, and there, beneath the grey stone arch—thin and frail and supported by the arm of Wigram, but alive, thank God: indisputably alive—was Jericho.
    Standing at the back of the church, in his overcoat with its bullet holes freshly darned, Jericho wished several things at once. He wished, for a start, that Wigram would take his bloody hands off him, because the man made his flesh crawl. He wished they weren't playing this particular hymn because it always reminded him of the last day of term at school. And he wished it hadn't been necessary to come. But it was. He couldn't have avoided it.
    He detached himself politely from Wigram's arm and walked, unaided, to the nearest pew. He nodded to Weitzman and to Kramer. The hymn was ending. His shoulder ached from the journey. 'Thy Kingdom stands and grows for ever,' sang the congregation, 'Till all Thy creatures own Thy sway.' Jericho closed his eyes and inhaled the rich aroma of the lilies.
    The first bullet, the one that had hit him like a blow from a car, had struck him in the lower left-hand quadrant of his back, had passed through four layers of muscle, nicked his eleventh rib and had exited through his side. The second, the one that had spun him round, had buried itself deep in his right shoulder, shredding part of the deltoid muscle, and that was the bullet they had to cut out surgically. He lost a lot of blood. There was an infection.
    He lay in isolation, under guard, in some kind of military hospital just outside Northampton—isolated, presumably, in case, in his delirium, he babbled about Enigma; guarded in case he tried to get away: a ludicrous notion, as he didn't even know where he was.
    His dream—it seemed to him to go on for days, but perhaps that was just a part of the dream: he could never tell—his dream was of lying at the bottom of a sea, on soft white sand, in a warm and rocking current. Occasionally he would float up and it would be light, in a high-ceilinged room, with a glimpse of trees through tall, barred windows. At other times, he would rise to find it dark, with a round and yellow moon, and someone bending overhead.
    The first morning he woke up he asked to see a doctor. He wanted to know what had happened.
    The doctor came and told him he had been involved in a shooting accident. Apparently, he had wandered too close to an Army firing range ('you bloody silly fool') and he was lucky he hadn't been killed.
    No, no, protested Jericho. It wasn't like that at all. He tried to struggle up but the pain in his back made him cry out loud.
    They gave him an injection and he went back to the bottom of the sea.
    Gradually, as he started to recover, the equilibrium of his pain began to shift. In the beginning, it was nine-tenths physical to one-tenth mental; then eight-tenths to two-tenths; then seven to three, and so on, until the original proportions were reversed and he almost looked forward to the daily agony of the changing of his dressings, as an opportunity to burn away the memory of what had happened.
    He had part of the picture, not all of it. But any attempt to ask questions, any demand to see someone in authority—any behaviour, in short, that might be construed as, 'difficult'—and out would come the needle with its little cargo of oblivion.
    He learned to play along.
    He passed the time by reading mystery stories, Agatha Christie mostly, which they brought him from the hospital library—little red-bound volumes, warped with use, with mysterious stains on their pages which he preferred not to study too closely. Lord Edgeware Dies, Parker Pyne Investigates, The Seven Dials Mystery, Murder at the Vicarage. He got through two, sometimes three a day. They also had some Sherlock Holmes and one afternoon he lost himself for a blissful couple of hours by trying to solve the Abe Slaney cipher in The Adventure of the Dancing Men (a simplified Playfair grid system, he concluded, using inverted and mirror images) but he couldn't check his findings as they wouldn't let him have pencil and paper.
    By the end of the first week, he was strong enough to take a few steps down the corridor and visit the lavatory unaided.
    In